The use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, tickets, labels and inlays to track, identify and locate goods has grown significantly in recent years. RFID tags allow manufacturers, distributors and retailers, amongst others, to regulate products and inventory, quickly determine production, manufacture, distribution or retail needs and efficiently intake and outtake items utilizing RFID tags. The RFID tags themselves can provide any desired product data and may be scanned or read in any of a variety of manners in order to retrieve the information contained on the chip on the RFID tag.
RFID inlays are typically incorporated into labels or card stock to form tags that can be applied to items or item packaging either directly through the use of adhesive or indirectly such as through a fastener, e.g. string, plastic tie, etc. Labels and tags incorporating RFID inlays can complement the advantages of RFID with visual indicia, such as barcodes, alphanumeric identifiers, descriptive text, variable and fixed, and pictographic information. For example, in a retail environment, an apparel hang tag can incorporate an RFID inlay and can further include graphic information such as the brand of the product, fixed indicia such as product description, variable indicia such as product size, price, care, product identifying information such as a barcode, and so forth.
Typically, the visual indicia are imaged onto a sheet of labels by a printing press or similar printing platform, such as flexographic or gravure. Known RFID tag and ticket printing platforms do not have the ability to encode chips on RFID inlays. Certain labels incorporating RFID inlays exiting a printing platform may include pre-printed variable data for encoding a chip included with a RFID inlay. However, the chip on the RFID inlay must be encoded such that the encoded data matches the pre-printed variable data displayed on the label. If the printed information does not match the encoded information, the tag, inlay and printing are rejected and result in additional waste and cost to the brand owner and manufacturer.